Are You Responsible for a Business ?

How to Sort Out Your Online Marketing

By Robert Kamaralli

I’m going to lay out an action plan that you can follow, or that you can hand to your staff to implement.

It will show you :

Where to start,

How much you can afford to spend and

How to keep things moving so the plan doesn’t bog and go nowhere.

This information isn’t for everyone.

It’s for owners of companies and people responsible for the success of a business.

It’s for people who are providing a valuable product or service to people.

It’s for you if you want to sort out the whole online marketing thing so that it works for you.

(1) Where to Start

First find out where the guys you want as your customers are.

Then you can put an offer where they’ll see it.

And you need to know what they’re interested in, so that you can talk about that and increase the chance they’ll respond.

For example, I know that people responsible for the success of a company don’t want to stuff around wasting time, they want to avoid risks and want to get rid of the confusions and headaches.

So here’s how to find out about your ideal market point by point ( I’m trying to balance making this short, with providing enough data for you to do it. If I haven’t given enough detail, you can always email me and I’ll do my best to get you moving ).

(2) How to Say the Right Thing in the Right Place

We’re going to use Facebook, Alexa, Quantcast and Google Trends to locate what your potential customers like, what they're searching for and which demographic will respond best to your promotion.

Google Search

Make a list of the phrases that best describe your product or service.

Next list what you suspect people would be typing when they search for these things.

Go to Google search.

Type in one of the phrases from above and watch the drop-down phrases that Google suggests as you type.

After the search results appear, check how many Adwords are displaying. A good number of paid results indicates that people are making money on this phrase & that it’s commercial.

Scroll to the bottom of the results and look at the related searches. These are based on what other searchers typed prior to and after the current search phrase. Use them to check that their search intention is what you expect.

Use the related search phrases and Google’s suggested searches to get an idea of the intention of the searchers. Are the suggested and related searches look like the people are looking to buy, looking to get employed, to get training or to hire someone ?

Take a couple of the best search phrases that demonstrate the correct search intention and commercial intention and use these in FB Graph search to locate further likes and list the pages.

Facebook Graph Search

( It’s best to open a new tab in your browser & keep the Google search page open as well. )

Go to Facebook ( FB ) and make sure that you’re using it as yourself, rather than as a FB page. We’re going to use FB Graph search to find out what things the target audience like.

Graph search is currently only working for English (US). To check or set the language, click the right, drop-down arrow at the top of the FB page and select Settings. Change the Language to English (US) by clicking the Edit link on the right.

In the Search field at the top of the FB page, type Pages liked by people who like ___ and fill in the end of the phrase with one of the things describing your product. If your target audience is a specific job position, you can also type Pages liked by people who are managers ( consultants, business owners, etc ).

Make a list of about the top 30 pages liked, for each of the search phrases. This data can be used in targeting FB ads later, or in locating related websites to advertise on.

Alexa & Quantcast

Locate the web address ( URL ) of a number of the larger websites associated with pages liked on FB.

Also locate similar businesses & celebrities by using www.similarsites.com.

Go to http://www.alexa.com and enter the first address into the search field on their home page. Websites need to have a significant amount of traffic and authority for data to be accumulated for them. You won’t be able to get demographic data for most smaller websites.

Note the demographic data, then also do this for the other website you found.

Go to https://www.quantcast.com and do a similar thing.

Google Trends

Go to http://www.google.com/trends/ and enter the main search phrases you have in the search bar.

The graph shows interest in the phrase over time, which is useful in itself. But scroll down to the map below.

The areas of the map are listed on the right, showing most interest at the top.

Click on an area of the map to drill down into countries and states and you can locate the geographic areas where your target audience is concentrated.

So now you should have a good idea of what these people are interested in, their ages and education and what FB pages and websites you’re likely to find them on.

(3) What's Working? What's it Costing You ?

It's important to keep track of how much you're spending to promote, and there's a spreadsheet that we use for this ( which you can download here ).

Do you keep track of what's working and how much it's costing you ?

Our spreadsheet looks like this ...

A quick glossary ...

Tripwire
A very low-cost product or service that converts the prospect into a customer. We use a $7 Local consultation and a $2.85 Kindle book on Amazon.

Core Offer
This is your main product or service.

Up-sell
Something that enhances the value of your main product or service.

Measuring the results

This is how you do it :

Create a spreadsheet ( or use ours ) that has a line for each form of advertising. Type the profit you make on each item in a corner of the spreadsheet.

Add a column that multiplies the item-values with how many of each you get for the week.

Every time you get a contact or sell an item, add a 1 in the right spot.

Probably the easiest way to find out which promotion-source got you the contact is to remember to ask people. Also note-down their names, so that if they buy something later it gets entered for the correct promotion-source.

If sales are on-line, it can be a bit more automated. We use www.visualwebsiteoptimiser.com which tells you if people make it to the thank-you page after a sale and from what traffic-source they came from.

For a lot of businesses, where people phone in ( as happens a lot from Google's Local ABC map search-results ) or sales happen by invoice, you've just to ask them.

(4) This is About Setting up a Flow !

This bit is about how to keep things moving.

To survive well, a business needs to maintain a flow of contacts, who remain in contact and become clients or customers, who also remain in contact. It starts with being in front of the right people and saying the correct things, tracking costs and testing things fast.

Here’s a picture of one of our flows ( often called sales-funnels ).

This is what you do ...

Decide on something to offer people based on the research you did above.

Explain the offer on a website ( or Facebook ) page and tell them how to get the offer. You may ask them for an email address, or it might be a sale.

Choose a source of traffic to send people to the website page. We’re currently using Facebook because it’s marketing and targeting have become incredible the last 6 months, and it’s cheaper than Google and LinkedIn.

If you’re sending them from Facebook, use their custom audience to collect their FB IDs to re-send ads to them.

If they leave you an email address, then collect it to stay in touch with them, give them things and generate goodwill.

Flowchart out your sales funnel like in the diagram above so that you can easily see where contact info is going and what your offers are.

The key to running successful campaigns is to test a lot and do it fast. It’s not often that a campaign or marketing sequence runs perfectly from the start.

(5) What to do if you don’t know how to set up lots of pages to test, really fast ?

This is what you do :

1

Set up a WordPress website

This is really easy to do these days. If you have a different website set up already, it can be added on ( or you can have a second site - lots of companies run multiple sites ). You can find lots of website guys who can do this at http://www.Elance.com, http://www.serviceseeking.com.au, https://www.freelancer.com or http://www.guru.com.

2

Get Leadpages

http://www.leadpages.net works with WordPress and allows non-technical people to very quickly set up pages for offers. The pages are already pre-designed and tested and can be modified easily by uploading graphics and editing the text areas.

3

Run Facebook Ads

Facebook has powered ahead with their marketing tools and are an incredibly good place to start. Use the targeting I went over right at the beginning of this action plan. Track all your ads. We keep logs of our marketing campaigns, each with a number. If you’re doing this right, you’re going to end up with a lot of them and need to know which worked and which didn’t.

(6) How can you smooth this all out ?

Well that’s it. If it sounds like a lot of work, it can be.

But once you’ve got basic structure and routines in place, then things smooth out and you get a flow rather than points where things get stuck. If you’re interested in surviving in the digital marketing age, then I recommend putting this in place.

Check your email over the next few days, because I'll send you additional checklists and info that I hope will make it easier.

If you’d like help designing an online marketing plan then click here and leave me your email address. I’ll ask you a few questions, and we can schedule an online planning session together. We’d :

Identify your best prospective buyers

Design a custom online sales funnel for your business

See how to present your product or service to make the most money possible

There’s no cost for this and no obligation of any kind. I’m offering it because if you find it useful, you might like our help handling some parts for you.